There is just far too much stuff we don't know or haven't bothered to think about - to say that there isn't anything left to discover is to underestimate the immensity of details our world has.

My grandfather used to tell me (When he had still had the patience and memory for meaningful discussion and debate) that a man could spend his whole life studying a square foot of dirt from the garden and die having never discovered everything about it. I understand the idea that perspective is the most important thing in regards to discovery (Personal discovery) but I find myself battling a negative emotion when I 'discover.'

For example, last summer I went on a bit of a road trip with my grandfather, and there was a moment when we were deep in the woods in the Upper Peninsula, staring at a waterfall created where part of an old industrial dam had broken under the root of a tree that had grown in an old post hole. We were a few miles from the nearest road and I thought from most people. We spent maybe twenty minutes around the area, taking pictures and just watching the water when a tour group of senior citizens with a polo-clad state park guide came through, doing just as we had done, taking pictures and oohing and ahhing. I felt instantly put off of the whole experience, because I hadn't 'discovered' anything. I was just another tourist, another voyeur, in the day to day of that place. This is an extension of the feeling of my original post, and since that day I don't take quite the same pleasure in being out in the woods, around ruins, old structures as I once did, because in the back of my mind I still feel like a voyeur, like a tourist.